The Revenge Dress
The first thing I saw this morning was a post on ‘Samantha Ruth Prabhu’s Revenge Dress’ — a fabricated story on what a very pretty actress wore for some occasion. The creator had attributed the reason for her wearing the beautiful dress to celebration of her divorce from a popular actor. I have seen a similar story circulating for Princess Diana too — The idea of a Revenge Dress. Really? You made a theory out of a goddamn dress?
If you are a girl reading this, I am sure you will agree that you and I don’t wear clothes as comeuppance. We wear what flatters us and what is convenient. We dress for fashion, activity and weather, our sartorial sense often coming from our peers and what our job requires. We love to gush about how and where we bought our dress and how much we spent on it. If we earned it ourselves, our dress shines all the more.
So, what kind of dramatics do you live in to cook stories about our dress? Your pathetic outlook doesn’t stop at decoding someone's choice of clothes. Someone had a haircut? She is sad. Someone exercises in the gym? She is converting her pain to something (Really! I read this shit somewhere!).
The fact is, we women get a haircut because we love to pamper ourselves and we go to the gym because we love our health. So spare a minute and consider the fact that maybe your thoughts are rotten?
Spiteful and vengeful women, and women needing ‘correction’ are the heartbeat of a male fantasy narrative. And then there are these ‘dimwitted, damsels in distress’, ‘psycho women’, and ‘women who cannot stop thinking of a guy’ who vacillate between being heroines and villains. But somehow a guy is the main character. I think a lot of this stereotyping can be addressed in upbringing. In fact, if you believe in these tropes, maybe you should go back to study in a co-ed school and fix your mindset.
Much as I am an advocate of staying away from drama (online and otherwise), I can’t help observing the volume of violent and hateful videos and behavior I have seen over the past few years. It is perhaps some form of harassment.
I very well remember the first video that hit my feed — A girl gives a chocolate to a guy. She playfully withdraws her hand when he comes to take it. The guy slaps her, then beat her black and blue. And I was wondering why I was receiving content like this. There were multiple versions of this video, where the girl eventually gets badly slapped or beat up. This was followed by videos of freak and sordid accidents involving families, women slipping and having a bad fall, extremely obese women dancing, disfigured women narrating a sad story, women being gold diggers, ‘How to’ videos of ‘Where to find a rich husband’, a woman beating up a guy badly, exorcism rituals, and so on … the visuals were quite distressing. What kind of targeted campaign is this?
That Thing Called Spite
How often have you heard the term ‘Spite drives her actions and ambitions’ ? Have you ever seen this applied to a guy? An ambitious man is just that — an ambitious man who wants to do well in life. But someone else grabs credit for what a woman does — and that someone is generally Spite. Nothing she achieves deserves merit. Look at that poor kid who topped her exams and got body shamed for facial hair instead. Because that is where your judgmental eyes are. Move to the corporate, and when she gets a promotion, its her suffering family or husband who get highlighted. A woman saying no / talking back / calling out bullshit is Aggressive. A guy doing the same is the Boss. A woman needs taming and tinkering. But the most negative guy is just a ‘dark hero’ who is often worshipped.
If you are a guy (or even a woman) reading this, maybe it pays to remember that girls these days have grown up watching Disney and Marvel movies. We are our own hero, we have dreams and goals, we dress up, we speak our mind, we fight villains and we love ourselves. Why is our self-love offending you? Please get a life. And while we are at this, maybe try to be a voice for things that really matter.
